Me and Levi Leipheimer or why professional cyclists make it look easy

Watching the Tour of California a few weeks ago on TV, I gawped in disbelief as top cyclist Levi Leipheimer powered up a hill near Santa Cruz.

I’d ridden that same hill a couple of weeks before. But where Levi barely broke a sweat, I almost died of asphyxiation at the side of the road, gasping for air like a beached fish.

Levi made the Bonny Doon mountain look like a gentle hill. But it’s not. It’s a relentless nightmare of a bastard climb that rises impossibly up into the air and doesn’t end. It barely seems possible to bike up. It’s a struggle for a powerful truck in the lowest gear. I had to zig zag from one side of the road to the other almost the entire way, and stop for breath several times. Levi flew up it like Perseus on a winged horse.

Riding such hills has given me a profound new respect for the riders of the Tour. When you watch the race on TV, you get little idea how brutal the mountains are. The cameras foreshorten the hills. It’s hard to see how impossibly steep the grades are. Over the course of the Tour, they will climb the equivalent of three Mt. Everests.

Plus, sitting on the couch, stuffing your face with chips, you have no idea of the distances they ride every day. Tour riders will bang out 100 to 150 miles a day — day after day for three weeks.

Earlier this year I started training for the Tour of the Californa Alps, better known as the “Death Ride.” I’d put on a lot of weight last year and wanted something challenging to get into shape. Little did I know what I’d signed up for. The Death Ride covers 130 miles in the high Sierras over five mountain passes — a total of 15,000 feet of climbing. The training is organized by the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s fantastic Team in Training Program, which gets you fit while raising money for blood cancer research.

The first training rides began in mid-February. After the first few rides I could barely walk for three days. I had to crawl up the front steps on my hands and knees after one of them. But week by week the distances got longer and the climbs steeper. In short order I was able to ride much longer and stronger than I’d ever imagined. The step-up training really works. In a few weeks I was able to tackle 70, 90 or 100 miles. Mount Tam? A molehill. I raced up it. 50-miles? Just a warm up.

That said, I’m still a fat blob and couldn’t keep up with a Tour rider if I was on a motorbike. They make it look easy. Take it from me, it ain’t.